Juntas accused of election disinformation campaign

With less than a fortnight to go before Presidential elections in Côte d'Ivoire, three other west African states – all ruled by military juntas – have been waging a disinformation campaign to disrupt the vote, reports RFI. Accounts linked to the juntas in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger have, among other things, announced the (fake) death of Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara and alerted followers to a (fictitious) coup. In August, several accounts with total followers in the tens of thousands ‘attempted to show there had been an insurrection to incite unrest’ in Abidjan, Côte d'Ivoire's National Agency for Information System Security said. Ouattara staunchly opposed the coups of 2020-2022 that brought the military to power in Burkina, Mali and Niger, which recently joined forces as the Alliance of Sahel States.

That campaign about Ouattara’s death was spearheaded by a Burkinabe account that used fake screen captures purporting to be from French broadcaster France 24 and a falsified graphic attributed to pan-African weekly magazine Jeune Afrique. The fake visuals were shared widely by cyber activists close to the opposition, according to RFI. Burkina Faso also has a group of highly influential cyber activists sharing the military junta's propaganda on social media. It is known as the Rapid Intervention Communication Battalion (BIR-C) and is run by US-based Ibrahima Maiga, who has 1.3 m followers on Facebook. ‘The key to the success of the BIR-C is their ability to seize on current events, turn them into distorted and manipulated content, and spread this via very active accounts with a huge audience in a co-ordinated and rapid manner’ said Jeremy Cauden, co-director of Afriques Connectees, an online reputation management firm in Abidjan. Accounts supportive of the military leaders of Burkina, Mali and Niger enthusiastically share online criticism of their Côte d'Ivoire counterpart.